Abstract
This paper defends the epistemological doctrine of fallibilism from recent objections. In “The Myth of Knowledge” Laurence BonJour argues that we should reject fallibilism for two main reasons: first, there is no adequate way to specify what level of justification is required for fallible knowledge; second, we cannot explain why any level of justification that is less than fully conclusive should have the significance that makes knowledge valuable. I will reply to these challenges in a way that allows me to make progress on a number of important issues in contemporary epistemology: epistemic value, the functional roles of knowledge attributions, experimental epistemology, skepticism, the Gettier problem, and the lottery paradox. My argument is motivated by appealing to various insights derived from the method of ‘practical explication’, particularly the idea that a central purpose of the concept of knowledge is to flag reliable informants. My conclusion is that various practical and theoretical considerations derived from the method of practical explication support the fallibilist conception of knowledge.
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Notes
For a discussion of this topic, see Haddock et al. (2010) Epistemic Value.
Pritchard (2010, p. 8) calls this the ‘tertiary value problem’. This problem arises because the difference in value between knowing and lesser epistemic states is not thought to be a matter of degree but rather of kind.
The existence of trivial truths also suggests that knowledge is not always more valuable than true belief, since it is not obviously better to know trivial truths (Sosa 2003).
Here is a fuller description of the original case from Gettier (1963). Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job, and suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following proposition: (a) Jones is the man who will get the job and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith’s evidence for (a) is that he counted the coins in Jones’s pocket 10 minutes ago and that the company president assured him, Smith, that Jones would be selected. Proposition (a) entails (b): the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (a) to (b) and accepts (b) on the grounds of (a), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (b) is true. But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. Also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Smith has a justified true belief that does not seem to be knowledge.
Following Zagzebski (1994, p. 66), Pritchard (2005, p. 149), and Turri (2011, p. 1), I take Gettier cases to involve a ‘double luck’ structure. We start with a belief that meets the justification requirement for knowledge; then add an element of bad luck that would normally prevent one’s justified belief from being true; finally, add an element of good luck that cancels out the bad luck, so the belief ends up true.
The justification for a proposition \(p\) is defeasible if there is some true proposition \(q\) such that if the person were to become justified in believing \(q\), he or she would no longer be justified (to the requisite degree) in believing \(p\) (BonJour 2010, p. 65).
Vogel (1990) highlights this point.
Williamson (1994) is an exception.
If sorites arguments succeed, the loss of fallibilism would be the least of our worries. We would have problems to deal with for virtually any concept that admits of degrees (or any concept that has a necessary component that admit degrees, as with the justification condition for knowledge).
Modeling justification by the use of decimals on the number line is merely a helpful idealization. We should not interpret BonJour as demanding a degree of precision stated in such terms. Rather, his point is that a small increase in justification cannot take one from not-knowing to knowing in a non-arbitrary way that accounts for the value of knowledge, unless it leads us to conclusive justification.
One might not find the expertise metaphor convincing because there might be clear, regimented, and institutionalized answers to this question in some trades. This point does not obviously apply to my case of the craftsman, and I suspect there are many areas in which there is no clear standard or test for expertise. Moreover, I worry that any institutionalized answer would seem arbitrary. Does passing a test about the physical and chemical properties of propane suffice to make one an expert even of one cheated on the test or luckily guessed many of the answers? In any case, nothing significant turns on my expertise example. Similar worries apply to who counts as a ‘philosopher’, for instance. There are many other such concepts, such as the concept of an ‘addict’.
This analogy is not perfect if we assume that knowledge does not come in degrees, since it seems natural to say that A can be more of an expert than B.
Non-evidentialists can also endorse a non-quantitative model of justification. I simply mention evidentialism for illustrative purposes.
Chisholm (1977, pp. 9–10) mentions the following grades of justification for a belief: acceptable, reasonable, beyond reasonable doubt, evident, certain.
You might worry that this just pushes the question of the level of justification required for knowledge to the question of the level of reliability required for someone to fittingly serve as a source of actionable information for members of her community. However, I will answer this worry by specifying that level of reliability.
This method is suggested (but not endorsed) by Kaplan (2008, p. 353). My position is strongly informed by his view.
Without this assumption it would render utterly mysterious how people are adept at determining what a speaker means when uttering “S knows that \(p\)” (Rysiew 2001, p. 489).
This example is due to Kaplan (2008, p. 255).
Henderson (2009, 2011) shows that contextualism is not only compatible with the idea that knowledge attributions flag reliable informants, but also that this idea actually motivates contextualism. He draws a distinction between two broad communities: applied source communities and general source communities (2009, p. 126). The members of an applied source community are focused on some practical project, and are therefore concerned with sources of actionable information on which to proceed in their particular project. The members of a general source community, in contrast, are devoted to developing a body of results on which folk in various other communities might confidently draw, whatever their projects or purposes might be. Since the concept of knowledge is used to certify epistemic agents as reliable sources of information to some audience or group, whether an agent qualifies as a knower depends on the audience for which that agent is evaluated as a source of information. This motivates contextualism in the following way: when one is certifying a source of reliable information for an applied source community, one should be concerned with sources of information in view of the practical interests of the applied community. When one is certifying an epistemic agent for a general source community, one should be concerned with sources of information that will be reliable for an indeterminate range of applied communities and their various practical interests (i.e. low or high stakes), not a concrete limited purpose. I mention Henderson’s view to show that contextualism is not obviously ruled out by the position that I am defending.
I say “reasonably” terminate inquiry because I want to rule out cases in which we no longer feel like investigating or because we want to be alleviated from doubt. Also, false belief would not be a successful end to inquiry.
There may be exceptional cases in which speakers are willing to ascribe knowledge to somebody and yet it is reasonable to check further (see Brown 2008, pp. 1444–1445; Reed 2010, pp. 228–229). However, it is uncontroversial that “S knows that \(p\)” typically conveys that there is no need for further investigation (see Cohen 1999, p. 59; Millar 2010, p. 98).
Kvanvig (2003, p. 171), Kelp (2011), and Rysiew (2012) also argue that knowledge ascriptions terminate inquiry. Kelp and Rysiew argue that Craig misidentifies the main function of knowledge ascriptions by linking the concept of knowledge with identifying reliable informants rather than ending inquiry. I will demonstrate that these two ideas are compatible.
Admittedly, defending this position is not the main concern of BonJour’s paper. In fact, he is “uncertain” about whether the Cartesian view is correct and he suggests that there may be no coherent concept of knowledge in commonsense (2010, p. 58). Surely, however, an adequate refutation of fallibilism must show that one of the alternative views—either infallibilism or the no-coherent-concept view—offers a better overall theory (i.e. has more explanatory power and few counterintuitive consequences); otherwise the fallibilist might concede that his view has problems and yet maintain that his view is sufficiently better than the alternatives.
“Possible” denotes epistemic possibility.
Stanley (2005) argues that concessive knowledge attributions sound odd because they are semantically defective rather than pragmatically inappropriate. He writes, “My problem [with the pragmatic explanation] is that it is mysterious to me what he [Rysiew] takes to be the semantic content of epistemic possibility statements” (2005, p. 127). However, Dougherty and Rysiew (2009) suggest that what is epistemically possible for a subject are those things which the subject’s evidence does not rule out: \(q\) is epistemically possible for S iff not-\(q\) isn’t entailed by S’s evidence. Thus, “I know that \(p\), but it is possible that \(q\)” means “I know that \(p\), but there is a non-negligible probability on my total evidence that \(q\)”.
Likewise, “Henry is a zebra, but it might be that Henry is just a cleverly painted mule” could express a true proposition and yet sounds contradictory.
Unger (1975) also defends this view.
The exceptions were cases in which an agent’s belief was based on apparent evidence—i.e. evidence that only appears to be informative about the world. For example, Starmans and Friedman (2012, p. 278) mention a scenario where a student comes to believe that his professor is in her office because the student sees a convincing hologram sitting at the professor’s desk. Participants attributed knowledge more in the Authentic Evidence condition (67 %) than in the Apparent Evidence condition (30 %).
Nagel et al. (forthcoming) interpret their data to show that Gettier cases are “widely judged to be instances of justified true belief without knowledge”. I do not see how this conclusion is supported by the aforementioned data.
I do not endorse Kaplan’s conclusion that the concept of knowledge does not provide a useful goal for our inquiries. This conclusion leaves mysterious why we should have cared about knowledge in the first place.
Again, there is much disagreement about what “our” intuitions are. The intuition that Henry does not know that he sees a barn has been denied by several philosophers, including Lycan (2006, p. 158), Millikan (1984), Turri (2011, p. 8), and (now) myself. Gendler and Hawthorne (2005) argue that the intuition is unstable, and DeRose (2009, p. 49) says that this judgment is not “clearly enough correct for it to be usable as the premiss of a good argument”. There has been no empirical work to support the claim that the majority of philosophers have the intuition that Henry lacks knowledge. Some empirical data shows that non-philosophers do not share this intuition (Colaço et al. 2012).
Reed supplements this view with an explanation that prevents these different pieces of knowledge from being aggregated into a problematic conjunction (i.e. knowing that tickets 1 and 2 will lose, knowing that tickets 1, 2, and 3 will lose... knowing that the first 999 tickets will lose, so the winner must be ticket 1,000). Reed’s (2010, p. 234) solution is to restrict the closure principle to a small number of plausible premises, thereby preventing us from bringing multiple premises into inferential contact. Thus, we can know, for any collection of, say, five tickets, that all of them will lose, but we cannot know that the first 500 tickets will lose. Where to draw the line is difficult, as Reed admits.
My solution to the Gettier problem is not available to the lottery puzzle for two reasons: first, I assume there is widespread agreement that lottery ticket holders do not have knowledge merely on the basis of probability (unlike the lack of agreement in Gettier cases); second, lottery ticket holders do not strike us as unreliable in any sense (unlike Gettier victims).
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Acknowledgments
For helpful advice I am grateful to Hallvard Lillehammer, Chris Cowie, Robin McKenna, Nick Hughes, and the participants of a 2013 Cambridge philosophy seminar. This paper was written while I was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Hannon, M. Fallibilism and the value of knowledge. Synthese 191, 1119–1146 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0315-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0315-z